In 1973, Marian Wright Edelman, a veteran of the civil rights movement, founded a new Washington-based interest group, the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). By focusing attention on issues affecting children, Edelman hoped to create the type of interracial, cross-class alliances needed to facilitate real change in public policy. “CDF came into being in the early 1970s,” she later explained, “because we recognized that support for whatever was labeled black and poor was shrinking and that new ways had to be found to articulate and respond to the continuing problems of poverty and race, ways that appealed to the self-interest as well as the conscience of the American people.”Footnote ¹ In orienting itself in this way, CDF reflected a larger trend among liberal interest groups in the 1970s. The rise of this new interest group that married a 1960s-ambivalence toward the state and expertise with an inside-the-Beltway sophistication had wide-reaching influence on public policy for children. The development of the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, the legislation that provided the first national guidelines for child welfare policy, demonstrates the importance of these new interest groups and their ideological orientation in shaping public policy from the 1970s to today.

Policymaking in the 1970s underwent both structural and ideological shifts—changes that were closely intertwined. The decade of the 1970s paradoxically witnessed an increased national focus on public policy, an “erosion of confidence” in government, and the rise of new interest groups in a range of policy areas.Footnote ² Issues such as hunger, consumer rights, and the environment, galvanized the creation of new Washington-based advocacy groups.Footnote ³ The new interest groups of the 1970s that were successful found a niche in a world of proliferating congressional subcommittees, think tanks, and public-interest organizations. But they also succeeded because they manifested an ideological orientation that challenged the state-centered assumptions of the New Deal order and they distilled sometimes-imprecise critiques of social policy into concrete legislation.

Hugh Heclo astutely observed that the lesson of the 1960s for many Americans was that “so far as the governing system is concerned, one should both expect more and trust less than ever before.”Footnote ⁴ This lesson certainly shaped politics and public policy in the 1970s. As scholars have recounted, this orientation created new roles for courts, strengthened the authority of administrative agencies, and transformed the structure and role of Congress.Footnote ⁵ But it also reshaped the legislative process itself, placing new problems on the agenda and opening the policy-making process to new solutions.Footnote ⁶ This post-1960s paradox was particularly acute in efforts to reform child welfare policy as advocates, like CDF, called for a new set of standards and expectations for state action while at the same time questioning the ability of the state to intervene successfully in families.

The development of child welfare policy in the United States was a haphazard occurrence. No overarching plan shaped what would become known as foster care; instead, policy developed piecemeal as institutions, states, and the federal government developed discrete child welfare programs and legislation. While care for children in large congregate shelters or in surrogate families was a common occurrence in the nineteenth century, the reigning experts campaigned in the twentieth century for transfer payments so that poor families could afford to keep children at home. As the 1909 White House Conference on children declared, “The home should not be broken up for reasons of poverty.”Footnote ⁷ The result, well documented by scholars, was the proliferation of Mother’s Pensions programs across the United States, and, eventually, the creation of Aid to Dependent Children (later Aid to Families with Dependent Children or AFDC) in the Social Security Act of 1935.Footnote ⁸ Yet programs for substitute care for children were not completely neglected by the federal government. The Social Security Act included a small provision for child welfare services, and, by the 1960s, a program had been developed to provide federal support to children in foster care. Known as AFDC-Foster Care, this program became mandatory in all states under the 1967 amendments to the Social Security Act.Footnote ⁹

Still, even with these federal programs, it would be difficult in the 1970s to talk of a national system of foster care or child welfare services. “There is no overall explicit federal policy toward children out of their homes,” wrote CDF in a 1978 report. The lack of national organization was evident in many states. The pattern of “foster care drift” in which children moved in and out of foster care and among various homes and institutions, first documented in the 1950s, remained an all-too-typical experience for children in the child welfare system. And the placement of children, with some in institutions and others in foster family homes, appeared to follow little rhyme or reason or take into consideration how children in temporary substitute care would be reunited with their parents or readied for adoption. “The implicit policy reflected in federal funding priorities,” CDF concluded, “acts as a disincentive to the development of strong programs ensuring children their own or adoptive families.”Footnote ¹⁰

The passage of the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 provided for the first time a national policy for children who had been removed from their parents or who were in danger of being removed from their homes due to maltreatment or neglect. The new legislation encouraged states to make a commitment to “permanency planning”—to provide services to help keep children with their parents or, if that was not possible, to encourage the adoption of children. Furthermore, the law required periodic judicial oversight of children in foster care in an effort to limit foster care drift. Proponents of the legislation believed that these programs and procedures would reduce the reliance on foster care and provide safeguards to protect the children receiving substitute care across the country. Most important, the law provided a framework for future national child welfare legislation in the United States.Footnote ¹¹

This article examines how the Children’s Defense Fund, a new public-interest group, emerged in the unique policymaking environment of the 1970s and how it came to play an integral role in pushing for new child welfare legislation in the late 1970s. The need for child welfare legislation was not created by CDF, nor was the ideological perspective that shaped the legislation unique to CDF. However, the rise of CDF, grounded in the “new liberalism” of the era, and the policies of the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 exemplify the changing nature of interest groups in the 1970s and their effects on public policy.

CIVIL RIGHTS, THE WAR ON POVERTY, AND THE WASHINGTON RESEARCH PROJECT

The year 1964 seemed a promising time for Marian Wright, a young African American lawyer, to set up shop in Jackson, Mississippi. On July 2, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964; that same summer, black and white students from around the country had flooded into Mississippi in an effort to register African Americans to vote and to galvanize the movement for federal protection of voting rights. Recently graduated from Yale Law School, Wright became the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar and went to work for the NAACP and other civil rights organizations in the state. Yet, in spite of her training and the new legal support for civil rights, Wright found litigation a frustrating tool in creating social change. “The thing I understood six months there,” she explained several years later, “was that you could file all the suits you wanted to, but unless you had a community base you weren’t going to get anywhere.”Footnote ¹² Thus, Wright attempted to “work through the law, but to back it up with all kinds of other things—mainly community organization.”Footnote ¹³

From Wright’s perspective, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were necessary for ending segregation and disfranchisement. But the Economic Opportunity Act, the War on Poverty legislation also passed in 1964, did more to create the type of community organization that would empower individuals at the local level. Wright became intimately involved with the War on Poverty and community organization through the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM). Civil rights activists in Mississippi created this group in 1964 to apply for funding through Head Start, the child development program included in the Economic Opportunity Act. From Wright’s observations, however, Head Start programs like CDGM were more than just child development programs; they also exemplified the notion of community organization that was so central to the movements of the 1960s. CDGM and other poverty programs “had a major impact about how people feel about themselves,” Wright testified in 1967, “because for the first time poor people are participating. They are making decisions, and they are insisting that they be included in all decision-making processes of government here.”Footnote ¹⁴ Wright believed Head Start was successful in Mississippi because it empowered individuals to overcome the barriers of poverty and participate in the decisions that shaped their lives.Footnote ¹⁵

But local community action was not enough. For such programs to succeed, Wright realized, groups in Washington had to defend and protect these programs from hostile action. Wright was particularly chastened in August 1965, when, under pressure from powerful Mississippi Senator John A. Stennis, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the agency overseeing the War on Poverty, cut all federal funding to CGDM based on accusations of financial misuse. While federal funding was eventually restored, Wright and other members on the board of CDGM recognized the vulnerability of programs intended to support the poor. Later she would look at this event as formative in shaping her perspective on policy advocacy. “This experience taught me the crucial importance of bridging the gap between local efforts and federal policy. The lack of a Washington-based advocate who could anticipate, police, and counter the hostile moves by Senator Stennis and others meant that the people who should have been concentrating on children spent inordinate amounts of time trying to survive political attacks.” Footnote ¹⁶ By the time Wright left Mississippi in 1968, she was convinced of the value of both local community organization and the need for work at the federal level to protect and support such local projects.

Taking the latter lesson to heart, Marian Wright Edelman (she had married Robert F. Kennedy adviser Peter Edelman in July 1968) founded, in 1968, the Washington Research Project (WRP) to work at the federal level to protect and expand the gains of the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. WRP intended to lobby within administrative agencies to ensure that the implementation of federal legislation would actually assist the poor. But WRP did not focus on administration and regulation alone; Edelman also created a WRP Action Council with no tax-exempt status in order to lobby for legislation in Congress. Edelman’s organization envisioned a broad mission, but it came to find its greatest successes in organizing around issues regarding children. The first example of this was an effort to expand the Head Start program that Edelman had worked closely with in Mississippi into a broader national program of child development.

The political scientist Gilbert Y. Steiner has pointed out that all of the components for a new federal program for children had coalesced in the early 1970s. Reorganization of the executive branch created a new Office of Child Development in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that was searching for more programmatic responsibility. President Richard Nixon declared a national commitment to children in the first five years of life. And in the Senate, Walter Mondale succeeded in creating a new Subcommittee on Children and Youth under his chairmanship. Under these conditions, several organizations pushed for a federal child development program that would broaden the Head Start program in order to provide child development and day-care services to preschool children of all classes.Footnote ¹⁷

Yet traditional child welfare interest groups, such as the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), showed little interest in taking the lead on child development legislation.Footnote ¹⁸ From its founding in the 1920s, CWLA was the primary, if not the sole, advocacy group concerned with issues of child neglect, substitute care, and adoption.Footnote ¹⁹ The league had long been ambivalent about the use of day care and had only recently endorsed a greater state role in this area. Further, CWLA, led by professional social workers, had never been particularly enthusiastic about Head Start, a program that, like most of the initiatives of the War on Poverty, purposely bypassed traditional social service providers. The league thus was hesitant to push for legislation that would expand the Head Start model. The organizational leadership for child development legislation would have to fall to others, namely to Marian Wright Edelman. Edelman, only in her thirties, took the lead in creating alliances to pass child development legislation. Recruiting organizations as diverse as the AFL-CIO, the National Welfare Rights Organization, the National Organization for Women, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Edelman created the Ad Hoc Coalition for Child Development with representatives of twenty-four organizations as members. This coalition would serve as the driving force in shaping a child development bill.

Head Start had been created as a minor provision in the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964; now under Edelman’s leadership, it had the potential to form the germ of a new expansive program for all American children. The legislation, first introduced in the House by Congressman John Brademas and in the Senate by Walter Mondale, would provide support for local private or public organizations (but not schools) to create programs for the care and education of preschool-age children. Rather than limit these programs only to poor children, the legislation proposed that children of families of all incomes be able to enroll their children using a sliding scale of tuition. The legislation thus had the potential to create both a national system of day care for preschool children as well as universal assistance to prepare children for school.Footnote ²⁰ The Nixon administration was initially supportive of child development legislation, but the ideological distance between Edelman’s coalition and the administration proved too wide to bridge. Edelman insisted that small communities remain eligible for child development funding so that the program could act as a catalyst for community organization. Nixon, however, refused to agree to legislation that would revive President Johnson’s War on Poverty.Footnote ²¹ When the bill passed with Edelman’s preferences for small sponsoring organizations, Nixon vetoed it.Footnote ²²

In spite of Nixon’s veto, liberal activists found a glimmer of hope in the campaign for the Child Development Act. For individuals like Marian Wright Edelman, the campaign for child development demonstrated that public policy for children was greater than just a local or state-level concern. Children’s issues had enormous potential in forming national political coalitions and programs like Head Start had entrenched the federal government in public policy for children. This realization would eventually lead Edelman to found the Children’s Defense Fund in 1973. In developing a new public-interest group, however, Edelman was forced to compete with existing children’s interest groups and to carve out a place for a new organization with a child-centered mission.

THE RISE OF THE CHILDREN’S DEFENSE FUND

The major player in shaping public policy for children before the 1970s was CWLA. A coalition of local private and public child welfare agencies, CWLA set operating standards for its members and represented their interests with both the states and the federal government. Over the 1970s, however, new groups and new perspectives on child welfare challenged the organization’s authority. CWLA’s constituency of professionalized child welfare workers, once its claim to expertise, became its greatest weakness. In addition, headquartered in New York City, the center of social welfare agencies for decades, CWLA remained disconnected from federal policy debates. It was not until 1970 that the league opened a two-person office in Washington. Although headed by the dynamic William Pierce, this office was not enough to keep up with the growing number of administrative agencies and congressional subcommittees that touched on child welfare issues.Footnote ²³ Rather than recasting child welfare in a broader framework and building new alliances, CWLA spent much of its energy lobbying to increase funding for existing programs.

Founded in 1973, Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund would, by the end of the decade, surpass CWLA as the premier children’s advocacy group. In many ways, CDF was everything CWLA was not. Its leaders came from outside the social-work establishment, some with experience in the civil rights movement. Unencumbered by the need to respond to constituencies of social workers and child welfare agencies to which CWLA owed its existence, CDF was able to claim that its work was for the “public interest.” With a broad framework, the organization fostered alliances with other interest groups that, at times, shared its policy goals for children. And the organization was, for most of its life, headquartered in Washington, where it made a concerted effort to push its interests within administrative agencies and the courts, as well as inside the newly powerful subcommittees in Congress.

The limited resources available and the lack of leadership from CWLA fostered competition in developing a new interest group focused on children. Even before the passage and the veto of the Child Development Act in 1971, and well before Edelman had turned her attention to children, efforts had begun to create a new child-focused organization that would become known as the Children’s Lobby. The Lobby was the brainchild of Jule Sugarman, the founding director of Head Start, the acting director of the federal Office of Child Development after its creation, and, by 1970, the New York City human resources administrator for Mayor John Lindsay.Footnote ²⁴ Sugarman envisioned the organization as “frankly and openly a lobbyist for the interests of children, youth, and families.” The Lobby would focus its “energies on efforts to enact legislation, secure appropriations and promote effective administration.”Footnote ²⁵ Sugarman’s hope was that pressure on Congress would force it to appropriate funds for child welfare programs that had been underfunded for decades.Footnote ²⁶ The Child Welfare League of America recognized the need for a national child-focused organization and attempted to shape the organization through its Washington representative, William Pierce. The Lobby, however, saw little tangible success and was plagued by financial problems. Pierce, who served as the organization’s secretary in addition to his CWLA work, had predicted the Lobby’s trajectory back in 1972. “The Lobby will claim much, cost much, and do little except distract attention from the need for a real ‘children’s advocacy group that is allowed to influence legislation.’”Footnote ²⁷ By 1974, when Sugarman left New York to become city administrator of Atlanta, the short life of what Gilbert Y. Steiner called the “lobby that never lobbied” was over.Footnote ²⁸ The “real children’s advocacy group” that would emerge, it turned out, was Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund.

In spite of its failure, the Children’s Lobby must have been attractive to some members of CWLA. Sugarman was not interested in reordering or reconceptualizing child welfare; his interest was in pushing Congress to fully fund programs for children, a platform on which all child welfare activists could agree. His approach was fairly conservative. In an attempt to resuscitate child development legislation in 1971, Sugarman worked with Republican members of Congress to develop a bill “with new administrative arrangements recognizing an enlarged role for the States.”Footnote ²⁹ This was an explicit rejection of the community-action features of child development that Marian Wright Edelman had insisted upon. When one representative suggested that the Children’s Lobby take part in “direct action, sit-ins and the like,” Sugarman rejected the notion out of hand, explaining that “he was aiming at the Middle Americans, the conservatives,” and these tactics would backfire in gaining their support.Footnote ³⁰

The success of the left-leaning Children’s Defense Fund over the traditionally liberal Children’s Lobby demonstrated the strange political tenor of the 1970s. Traditional liberal activists like CWLA struggled to survive in this shifting political environment. In 1973, William Pierce encouraged Joseph Reid to caricature the new child welfare activists in his effort to secure funding for CWLA. “There exists,” Pierce wrote, “two frightening alternatives.” These were, of course, the Children’s Lobby and the Children’s Defense Fund. “On the one hand,” Pierce continued, “the source is confronted with an arch-enemy claiming credit for the illustrious work done by the source. On the other hand, the source is confronted with the Radical Left using children, politicizing children, for their own narrow ends … Jule Sugarman as bogeym[a]n on option one. McGovernism and Black Power as bogeymen on the other.”Footnote ³¹ To the chagrin of Pierce and other child welfare activists, the “Radical Left” approach to child welfare would prove to be successful.

Following the fight for a child development act in 1971, it would take an additional two years for Marian Wright Edelman to develop the Children’s Defense Fund. Unlike Sugarman, Edelman’s organization was able to provide a comprehensive vision, secure foundation support, and gain expertise over the issues affecting children.Footnote ³² Edelman also reached out to long-standing child welfare experts and hired two prominent figures, Justine Wise Polier and Elizabeth Wickenden, to work for her new organization. As early as 1972, Edelman began to brainstorm projects for the new organization. Her goal was not to become a lobbyist for children. Instead, her new organization would focus on research and litigation to improve the conditions of children with a particular focus on poor and minority children. Therefore, Edelman initially proposed three campaigns—a litigation campaign focused on children in custodial institutions, a study of the process leading to the institutional commitment of children, and a study of children excluded from schools.Footnote ³³ The focus on these issues did not mean that the organization was not interested in other areas. In fact, Edelman presented William Pierce at CWLA with a “laundry list” of children’s issues. “No single organization could possibly cover all of those issues,” Pierce commented on CDF’s exhaustive list, “and I cannot understand what the purpose of such a list would be, unless it would be to suggest that absolutely everything that in any way had to do with children and families was now the responsibility of Marian’s new organization.”Footnote ³⁴ Pierce was probably a bit paranoid, but he was right to recognize that CDF would become a leading national organization on children’s issues and a threat to the authority of CWLA.

The official announcement launching CDF came on May 22, 1973. According to Edelman, this new wing of the WRP would provide a voice for children. Children, she asserted, were “probably more in need of representation in an organized way than any other group in America.” Viewing the mandate of the new organization broadly, she stated that children were “non-persons and simply don’t have any rights in the present system.” An anonymous member of the WRP, probably Edelman herself, revealed the strategic thinking behind the creation of CDF. “Things called ‘poor’ and ‘integration’ are not very popular these days. … We had to find new ways to achieve the goals of social reform begun in the sixties and to extend the base to attack those problems that affect the black and the poor but also affect white kids.”Footnote ³⁵ Edelman realized that to be a successful interest group in the 1970s she needed a broad base of liberal support.

THE CHILDREN’S DEFENSE FUND AND 1970S LIBERALISM

The proliferation of interest groups during the 1970s has been well documented by scholars. The political scientist Jeffery M. Berry has noted that over the decade there was an unparalleled growth in public-interest groups; that is, a group that “seeks a collective good, the achievement of which will not selectively and materially benefit the membership or activists of the organization.”Footnote ³⁶ In defining the “public interest liberalism” of these new interest groups, Michael W. McCann found a commitment to participatory democracy and a preference for quality-of-life concerns over maximizing economic growth central to this new liberal ideology, a perspective Berry termed “postmaterialism.”Footnote ³⁷ The example of CDF demonstrates that during the 1970s even organizations that were pursuing redistributive goals attempted to frame their policy preferences in nonredistributive terms. CDF intentionally packaged its policy goals that focused on poor and minority children as part of an effort to ensure a minimum quality of life for all children. This strategy was reflected in CDF’s long-standing motto to “leave no child behind.”

The approach of CDF, and most public-interest groups formed in the 1970s, was too pragmatic, too responsive to current demands to develop a fully coherent political philosophy. Yet certain principles that Edelman followed demonstrate a new liberalism that at times would be at odds with the approaches of the traditional child welfare activists of the New Deal and the postwar eras. First, there was a strong commitment to participatory democracy and grassroots organization. Often this commitment was praised more than it was practiced, but a commitment to these ideals, as the conflict over the Child Development Act of 1971 demonstrated, animated the organization. Second, “rights consciousness” permeated the work of CDF. The organization turned to constitutional protections of due process rights in framing a litigation strategy, but it also used the language of rights as a rhetorical device in advocating its policy goals. Third, CDF displayed an ambivalence over the power of the state and questioned traditional expertise. While CDF would form ties with traditional child welfare experts, it was skeptical of received wisdom and worked tirelessly to collect its own data outside accepted expert analysis.

Edelman’s organization was shaped in direct response to her experiences with the Child Development Group of Mississippi, where she witnessed the success of local community organization only to see the program threatened by Congress. CDF, therefore, was an attempt to bridge the gap “between local efforts and federal policy.”Footnote ³⁸ From Edelman’s perspective, action was needed at both levels to bring about social change. In an interview soon after the founding of CDF, she explained that activists for children in local communities “care about kids but have no larger strategies into which they can fit their local action.” Advocates on the federal level, conversely, “may be politically savvy but need support from local groups to implement any kind of change.”Footnote ³⁹ CDF would not be a grassroots organization per se, but it would organize its research and policy campaigns with an eye to including and educating local activists. Ultimately, Edelman theorized, political strength and successful social change required local organization.

Many critics of public-interest groups like CDF have argued that the focus on local participatory democracy by these organizations was largely fanciful. Sidney M. Milkis notes that these groups “largely abstained from partisan strategies of grassroots mobilization and electoral alliance as means of developing effective political influence.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Such a critique partially misinterprets what CDF and other groups meant by local participation—voting in elections or loyalty to a party were much less important than working to improve one’s community. Participatory democracy was meant to be as much about participation, and the empowerment of individuals through participation in the issues that shaped their lives, as it was about the traditional partisan democratic system. The public-interest liberals were inspired by an ideal of citizen participation and thus advocated policies that could foster local community activism. It is this commitment that explains the intransigence of Edelman on the size of sponsoring organizations in the vetoed 1971 Comprehensive Child Development Act. It is also this commitment that explains the growth of citizen participation programs in federal legislation over the 1970s.Footnote ⁴¹ These policies did not always lead to greater citizen participation of the type Edelman envisioned, but they created the potential for such participation to occur.

A commitment to children’s rights also helped define the ideal for which CDF was created. Yet this commitment to rights was vague. As Hillary Rodham, then a newly-minted lawyer working for CDF (she would marry Bill Clinton in 1975), wrote in 1973, “The phrase ‘children’s rights’ is a slogan in search of a definition.” Exploiting the vagueness in the motto, CDF talked of children’s rights in two distinct ways. First, they initiated a litigation strategy to expand the due process rights of children. This included asserting the right of children to a hearing before suspension from schools and litigation protecting children from “voluntary” admission to mental health institutions by their parents.Footnote ⁴² But Edelman and CDF also used the language of rights to talk about children’s needs and the state’s responsibility to fulfill these needs. CDF realized, of course, that such rights were not yet legally enforceable. A December 1974 CDF memo on the possibility of creating a national bill of rights made this distinction clear. “The very term ‘right’ implies an entitlement,” the memo explained, “which at the present time does not exist in law.” Instead of a bill of rights, CDF compiled a “statement of objectives.” “Our hope,” CDF staff explained, “is that this statement of objectives will serve as [an] interim document on children’s needs and a stimulus for action. If so, it may someday be possible to issue a meaningful bill of rights for children.”Footnote ⁴³

As other scholars have noted, the liberal public-interest organizations that emerged in the 1970s were ambivalent about the role of the state and the authority of so-called experts.Footnote ⁴⁴ CDF reflected this perspective. Edelman complained about a disconnect between child welfare experts and policymakers. “Researchers and academics have gone off in one direction,” she observed, “and those of us who have been involved in policy have gone off in another.” Edelman did not want to rely on the received wisdom of older child welfare interest groups or abstract academic studies; instead she longed for “useful evidence” to direct public policy.Footnote ⁴⁵ This was not an outright rejection of expertise, but skepticism of current experts and a desire to collect reliable data.Footnote ⁴⁶ The organization’s perspective on the state was more ambiguous. Edelman was supportive of a number of wide-reaching federal programs and would argue as head of CDF for the expansion of these programs and the creation of new ones. Yet she feared the brutal exercise of state power she had witnessed in Mississippi and she celebrated the empowerment of local communities. For her, federal programs should nurture basic institutions like community and family, not replace or subvert them. Directing programs though state government or urban machines, she asserted, often undermined these goals. This ambivalence toward state power would influence the organization’s policy recommendations.

THE RISE OF PERMANENCY PLANNING

The concerns that would lead to increased attention to federal child welfare policy did not suddenly appear in the 1970s. For decades, national organizations like CWLA and state- and local-based groups had identified problems with the use of foster care and attempted to implement reforms. The most influential investigation into the problem was the 1959 study Children in Need of Parents written by Henry S. Mass and Richard E. Engler and sponsored by CWLA. Mass and Engler’s most striking conclusion was that many children were “living a major part of their childhood years in foster families and institutions.”Footnote ⁴⁷ They found that if a child remained in foster care for over a year and a half it became unlikely that the child would ever be returned home or adopted. In response to these findings, CWLA pushed child welfare workers to consider stability and reunification in making decisions for children. Furthermore, local activists lobbied for legislation to ease the termination of parental rights and help free children in foster care for adoption in the 1950s and 1960s and to create state subsidies to encourage adoption of children out of foster care in the late 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ⁴⁸

Still, this early activism lacked a clear organizing principle to shape public policy. Reformers, often aligned with child welfare workers, had to balance the need for reform with the interests of child welfare service providers. It was in the 1970s that an intellectual critique of current child welfare practice focused reform efforts. This movement emphasized the importance of permanency for children’s psychological development and questioned the frequent use of foster care by child welfare workers. Essentially, these critics questioned whether the system of child welfare really improved the lives of the children under its care and supervision—child welfare workers, they argued, were fracturing families unnecessarily. This literature on the failure of child welfare would provide the basis for the Children’s Defense Funds’ legislative suggestions for child welfare reform.

The notion of permanency as the most important factor in policy for children received national attention after the publication of Beyond the Best Interests of the Child by Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert Solnit in 1973. The authors—a law professor, a psychoanalyst, and a child psychiatrist—aimed their argument at the legal doctrine of “the best interests of the child,” which was frequently followed in custody decisions. While nominally a good practice, the authors found that this doctrine often ignored “the child’s psychological well–being.” They therefore proposed that courts place children in “the least detrimental available alternative for safeguarding the child’s growth and development.” To do so meant to take into consideration a child’s bond with a “psychological parent” and a child’s sense of time. In other words, removal of a child from the parent with whom he or she had bonded, even for a short time, could disrupt the child’s psychological development. Permanency should be the ultimate goal of placement decisions.Footnote ⁴⁹

Goldstein, Freud, and Solnit did not craft their book as a critique of child welfare policy per se, but prioritizing permanency and the relationship between a child and psychological parent led them to caution against state intervention in families. “We have preference for privacy,” the authors explained. “To safeguard the right of parents to raise their children as they see fit, free of government intrusion, except in cases of neglect and abandonment, is to safeguard each child’s need for continuity. This preference for minimum state intervention and for leaving well enough alone is reinforced by our recognition that law is incapable of effectively managing, except in a very gross sense, so delicate and complex a relationship as that between parent and child.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This perspective also led to a subtle critique of foster care. The authors frowned upon temporary foster care for children, arguing that even short separations from a psychological parent could be traumatic. If temporary substitute care was needed, every effort should be made to maintain contact with the psychological parent. If, on the other hand, a child bonded with a foster parent, Goldstein, Freud, and Solnit asserted that the foster parent was now the psychological parent. In these cases, the book asserted, the law should recognize “common-law adoptions,” where the foster parent was transformed into the legal parent. For many who read this book with an eye toward foster-care reform, this idea became the essence of permanency planning. Every effort should be made to keep children with their parents, but if these efforts failed children should be moved quickly to permanent adoptive relationships.Footnote ⁵¹

Throughout the 1970s, radical critiques of child welfare moved beyond the suggestions voiced in Beyond the Best Interests of the Child. In their 1974 book, Children of the Storm, Andrew Billingsley and Jeanne M. Giovannoni examined child welfare through the lens of race. They found that the child welfare system, through both design and ignorance, worked to the disadvantage of black children. Attacking the work of child welfare activists to open therapeutic institutions and foster homes to children of all races and ethnicities, Billingsley and Giovannoni asserted that “the idea that integration is a goal to be sought has hindered child welfare services for the last twenty-five years.” This “integrationist” approach to child welfare, they argued, had failed to account for the particular needs of black children.Footnote ⁵² Other critics evaluated child welfare failings through the lens of class. Social work professor Shirley Jenkins proposed in 1974 that “the field of child welfare as system reflects the ordering of social class and socioeconomic status,” and therefore functioned “to perpetuate the status quo.”Footnote ⁵³ Put another way, child welfare workers had simply been operating to quell the social and familial disruptions found among the poor, not to fundamentally reorder society. The social welfare expert Elizabeth Wickenden termed these reactions a “revolt against the alleged paternalism and authoritarian approach of child welfare workers.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Where social workers were once viewed as part of the solution to the challenges of child welfare, they were now viewed by radical critics as part of the problem.

This growing attack on the role of child welfare workers and the objectives for the child welfare system bolstered the intellectual attraction of “permanency planning.” If the child welfare system was not leading to positive outcomes for children, then—in the words of Beyond the Best Interests of the Child—”minimum state intervention” and “leaving well enough alone” seemed to be preferable policies. This desire to encourage “permanency” began to shape policy recommendations even in the face of contrary evidence. In 1978, David Fanshel and Eugene B. Shinn published the first longitudinal study of foster care following 624 children for five years. At the end of their study, 36.4 percent of their sample remained in foster care. Yet Fanshell and Shinn found no ill effects from this long-term stay in foster care. They explained that “in general, we have developed the perspective that continued tenure in foster care is not demonstrably deleterious with respect to IQ change, school performance, or the measures of emotional adjustment employed.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Furthermore, children who remained in foster care often did as well or better then those who returned home after placement in foster care. In spite of their own findings, Fanshell and Shinn advocated for a reduced role for foster care. “We fear,” they admitted, “that in the inner recesses of his heart, a child who is not living with his own family or who is not adopted may come to think of himself as being less than first-rate, as an unwanted human being.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Even though their study could find no such indications, they believed that long-term foster care was emotionally damaging to children.

The perception of growing numbers of children in foster care along with the expense of keeping children in care further fueled the desire to reform child welfare policy. Of course it was difficult to get a national count of the number of children receiving substitute care. A 1971 count by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) showed 260,000 children in foster family care with an additional 6,000 children in group homes.Footnote ⁵⁷ After 1971, however, HEW did not require states to report on children in foster care who were not receiving federal funds. Thus, by the late 1970s, there was a wide variety in estimates of the number of children in substitute care. Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare discussed a foster-care population of 350,000 in 1977. A HEW study published in 1978 put the figure at 502,000, while the Children’s Defense Fund’s own study showed 448,000 children in out-of-home care. Despite the great variety, there was a consensus among experts, whether accurate or not, that the number of children in foster care was increasing.Footnote ⁵⁸

THE ADOPTION ASSISTANCE AND CHILD WELFARE ACT OF 1980

Foster care was not one of the initial policy areas that the CDF took on. Instead, the organization’s interest in the area developed out its litigation to expand children’s rights.Footnote ⁵⁹ Once the organization became interested in child welfare policy, however, it dedicated significant resources to this issue. As it had in other policy areas, CDF produced its own study of child welfare as a basis for its policy recommendations. Children Without Homes: An Examination of Public Responsibility to Children in Out-of-Home Care, published by CDF in 1978, was grounded in empirical research, including a survey of county child welfare probation offices, a detailed investigation of child welfare institutions in seven states, and a thorough analysis of federal child welfare policies. The study concluded that child welfare policy contained “a pervasive, implicit, anti-family bias,” that children were “abandoned psychologically and sometime literally by the public systems that assume responsibility for them,” and that both the states and the federal government failed to take responsibility or provide leadership that would ameliorate these problems.Footnote ⁶⁰ “States are often neglectful parents,” Children Without Homes claimed, “sometimes even abusive ones—failing to meet their ongoing obligations to individual children at risk of or in placement.”Footnote ⁶¹ The solution, CDF argued, was to “prevent unnecessary out-of-home placements,” to “ensure that each placement was in the least restrictive setting,” and to provide “timely, decisive review” of children in substitute care.Footnote ⁶² These reforms needed to occur in states and localities and, true to form, the report highlighted cases of local community programs that demonstrated improvement for children and their families. However, reform of federal legislation was also needed. Children Without Homes argued that federal funding of foster care created “fiscal disincentives to ensuring a child a permanent home.” Therefore, CDF called for restricting the use of federal funds for foster-home maintenance and placing a time limit on funding for “children in out-of-home care without good faith efforts to ensure the child permanence.”Footnote ⁶³ While CDF had conducted original research, its findings built upon and reflected the work of other studies and experts. What CDF’s study did was distill the notion of “permanency planning” into a coherent set of policy recommendations supported by concrete evidence that could be easily translated into legislation.

CDF did not work alone, emphasizes MaryLee Allen, a member of CDF who worked on the bill: “There were a lot of organizations involved.” These included, along with CWLA, the American Bar Association, the American Public Welfare Association, Catholic Charities, and the North American Council on Adoptable Children, among others. The investment of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in several studies of foster care further solidified interest in the subject. And the bill certainly would not have become law without the attention given to the issue by Congressman George Miller, his chief of staff John Lawrence, and senators Walter Mondale and Alan Cranston. It was Miller, who as a freshman congressman in 1975, repeatedly wrote to the General Accounting Office asking for more information on substitute care for children, and it was Miller who attended all the House hearings on the subject, questioning dozens of witnesses himself. Still, it seems likely that many of Miller’s actions were taken with the advice and guidance of CDF. Of all the parties that were interested in this policy area, CDF was uniquely positioned to provide leadership. Unlike other organizations that were responsible to their members, Allen later explained, “CDF was one of the only organizations that was an advocacy organization. We were not a membership organization, we didn’t represent individual agencies, we advocated on behalf of children in a number of different ways.” Furthermore, CDF received no government funding. This, Allen adds, “made it easier for CDF to speak out in criticizing government policies whether they be federal government polices or state policies.”Footnote ⁶⁴

The recommendations in the CDF report became the framework for the bills introduced in Congress. CDF called for a system of “procedural and substantive safeguards” for children in foster care or in danger of being removed from their homes as a precondition for receiving federal funds. For example, CDF suggested that before a child was removed from his or her home, services be made available to the family to prevent removal of the child and for reunifying the child with the family in the future. Subsequently, the proposed legislation required that “reasonable efforts will be made (A) prior to the placement of a child in foster care, to prevent or eliminate the need for removal of the child from his home, and (B) to make it possible for the child to return to his home.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Furthermore, CDF recommended that each child coming into care receive an individualized case plan; this too became part of the legislation.Footnote ⁶⁶ CDF’s recommendations that children be placed in the “least restrictive,” or most family-like setting, in close proximity to the child’s family, were also incorporated into the legislation.Footnote ⁶⁷ To provide an additional safeguard, CDF called for an administrative review of the child’s status every six months and a judicial review of the child’s case eighteen months after placement to determine if the child “should be returned home immediately; continued in care for a specified period; referred so he can be legally placed for adoption; or, in special circumstances, placed in permanent long-term foster care.”Footnote ⁶⁸ This became known as the “case review system” in the child welfare act incorporating language virtually identical to that drafted by CDF. Finally, CDF recommended the creation of adoption subsides for children with disabilities or other special needs; this became the adoption assistance program in the federal legislation.Footnote ⁶⁹

A bill with the basic framework laid out by CDF was first introduced in 1977. Building alliances with “the American Public Welfare Association, National Governors’ Conference, National Association of Counties, Child Welfare League of America, child advocacy groups, various state child welfare administrators and others,” CDF pushed for legislation that retargeted federal support from programs that maintained children in foster care to those that provided “preventive, restorative, and adoptive services.”Footnote ⁷⁰ With the newly inaugurated administration of President Jimmy Carter committed to the creation of a national family policy, this legislation took on increased importance. Unfortunately for CDF and its allies, the haphazard involvement of the Carter administration contributed to the bill’s demise.Footnote ⁷¹

Skeptical of the administration’s intentions, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, chairman of the Senate Public Assistance Subcommittee, questioned the evidence that expenses for foster care would actually decrease under the bill. In order to ensure that they were not creating another source for uncontrolled spending, the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Louisiana senator Russell Long, amended the legislation by placing a cap on AFDC–Foster Care. With funding for AFDC-eligible children in foster care no longer an open entitlement, the child welfare reform coalition fractured. Taking the lead in opposing the amended legislation, CWLA organized a network that included the American Parents Committee and the National Conference of Catholic Charities, which successfully killed the bill in the conference committee. CWLA’s opposition was both ideological and strategic. The league, Gilbert Y. Steiner observed, “perceived the fight as a holy war against closed-end spending, an evil philosophy that could limit public funds for league members and the children they serve, and as a chance to outmaneuver both Senator Long, an old antagonist, and the Children’s Defense Fund, an effective competitor for leadership in child advocacy.”Footnote ⁷²

The subtle conflict between CWLA and CDF played out again when the legislation was reintroduced in 1979. Nominally, both organizations supported the same policy: more support for child welfare services to prevent the removal of children and more support for subsidies to encourage adoption out of foster care. When the Carter administration proposed capping federal support for foster care through AFDC, the disagreement between the organizations resurfaced. CWLA did not want to risk capping foster care support on the questionable presumption that the foster care caseload would decrease in light of the approach of “permanency planning.” CDF, while voicing opposition to a cap, appeared content to place faith in a new approach to child welfare. After making an argument for wholesale failure of the current child welfare system, it was difficult for CDF to develop compelling arguments why any parts of that system should be maintained. In congressional hearings, CDF officials struggled to explain why they favored “carrots and incentives” in the form of new child welfare funding to “turn this needy system around,” rather than the stick that a cap on foster care support would provide.Footnote ⁷³ In the end, in spite of the lobbying of CWLA, the final legislation included a cap on federal support for children in foster care who were eligible to receive AFDC, but this cap would come into play only once the appropriations for child welfare services had been significantly increased. After 1981, the appropriation never reached the level to trigger the AFDC–Foster Care cap.Footnote ⁷⁴

The disputes over child welfare legislation in 1977 and 1979 betrayed CWLA’s concerns about CDF’s activism in this policy area. For the Child Welfare League of America, the arguments of CDF, a newcomer to the field, must have seemed full of bravado. CWLA had sponsored its own study of foster care—Children in Need of Parents by Henry S. Maas and Richard E. Engler—back in 1959.Footnote ⁷⁵ The league had long realized that many children in foster care would be there for a number of years and that there was great variety in the quality of foster care and other child welfare services. Furthermore, CWLA was a strong advocate of services to prevent children from being removed from their families and supported a variety of measures to encourage adoption; however, they also realized that for some children foster care, and even long-term foster care, was the only available option. The league dismissed CDF’s acceptance of the AFDC–Foster Care cap as overly optimistic and short-sighted.Footnote ⁷⁶ Finally, CWLA interpreted the attack of CDF on the system of child welfare as dismissive of their years of activism and of the dedicated service of their member agencies. After the passage of the federal foster care reform legislation in 1980, Elizabeth Cole, CWLA’s point person on adoption, recounted the harsh feelings that these critiques of child welfare engendered. “The battle over the legislation has left its wounds,” she lamented. “In establishing the problems with the foster care system that needed to be solved, some advocates made wholesale and slashing charges against agencies, foster parents, and social workers.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The conflict over foster care reform demonstrated the ways in which the new public-interest groups of the 1970s had reoriented liberal policymaking; CDF was willing to sacrifice established sources of federal funding and the feelings of child welfare workers in order to pass what it envisioned as the best policy approach.

The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, signed into law by President Carter on June 17, reflected the major policy recommendations of CDF. CDF and its allies had succeeded in providing national direction to reform the child welfare system. This was the beginning of the modern system of child welfare that is still in operation today. Initially the 1980 act was viewed as a great success. Even though the newly elected administration of Ronald Reagan attempted to cut these programs and Congress never fully appropriated the funding authorized by the legislation, the number of children in foster care declined over the early 1980s.Footnote ⁷⁸ By 1984, however, the rates of children entering foster care began to increase and by the 1990s the number of children in foster care would reach crisis proportions.Footnote ⁷⁹ In 1982, there were 262,000 children in foster care in the United States; by 1996, that number had reached 507,000 or 7 children for every 1,000.Footnote ⁸⁰ These numbers reflected that children were spending a longer amount of time in foster care and that long-term foster care was increasingly viewed as a permanent placement. In 1997, Congress revisited child welfare policy by passing the Adoption and Safe Families Act. The 1997 act maintained the administrative structure of the 1980 act and continued to profess allegiance to the notion of permanency planning, but permanency was reoriented; rather than finding permanency with their birth families, the law provided incentives to move children to permanent adoptive homes.Footnote ⁸¹ The 1980 act, therefore, was only one-step in a long struggle for child welfare reform.

CHILD WELFARE POLICY AND AMERICAN LIBERALISM

The passage of the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 and the creation of a national child welfare policy exemplified the new policy-making regime that had emerged over the 1970s. At the heart of this new regime was a proliferation of interest groups, especially public-interest groups like CDF. These groups succeeded because they were attuned to the structural requirements necessary to survive in this new environment. They focused on Washington as a new center of policymaking, managed to find resources and to create political coalitions, and produced and compiled research to meet their policy goals. These organizations also brought with them a particular ideological perspective. They were skeptical of purported experts. They were wary about the role of the state in shaping social policy and hoped to encourage local participatory democracy. And they relied on a language of rights in advocating their policies. All of these ideological preferences would affect their policy positions and create space for challenges to existing policy approaches to become part of administrative and legislative debate.

The political scientist Jeffrey M. Berry has argued that interest groups like CDF form the core of contemporary American liberalism.Footnote ⁸² To understand liberalism today, then, we must uncover the origins of such organizations in the 1970s. The political spectrum and the public policies we face today are largely a legacy of the rise of such interest groups. It is the perspective of these groups that creates the paradox that Hugh Heclo has observed of expecting more from government but trusting government less. In the case of child welfare policy, this has meant relying on state services to help maintain or reunify families, while remaining suspicious of any state efforts to provide temporary or long-term substitute care for children.

In the foreword to CDF’s report Children Without Homes, social welfare expert Elizabeth Wickenden recounted two common news stories about child welfare. In one, a child is “torn from his mother’s loving arms for seemingly trivial or irrelevant reasons.” In the other, a child arrives at the hospital “badly beaten by a parent.” Wickenden mused, “In the first instance the cry is, ‘Why can’t the government leave them alone’ and in the second, ‘Why didn’t the government do something?’” Yet she lamented, “Between these bouts of outraged social conscience” little effort was made to “strengthen the public child welfare responsibility.” Today, decades after the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, the reaction of wanting both more and less state action in child welfare remains. Part of the reason is rooted in the ideology and public policies of the 1970s.Footnote ⁸³